Un/Seen portraits of a post concussive artist

Image Description: A low resolution manipulated video still. On the left side, half of a woman’s face is shown up close. She has short black hair, is wearing large black rimmed glasses, red lipstick and is smirking. In the middle of the frame, you see a smaller version of the same woman looking at herself in the mirror in a red, green and yellow tone, with blue and purple tones at the bottom-right of the image.

On August 16th, 2016, I got a concussion while working on a project in another country. Instantly I was transported to a parallel dimension that was a murky and disorienting kaleidoscope of the one that I had previously occupied for the past 36 years of my life. Shortly after this invisible and perplexing injury disrupted my life, I began creating short experimental videos using a smartphone and tablet, which were then posted on Instagram. At a time that I felt the most isolated, depressed, and truly unseen, I was generating and posting a colorful and zany world online. This practice incidentally became a creative method to convey how I was experiencing the world with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and a means to have fun, explore new technology, meditate, and distract myself from the mental rollercoaster of my ongoing recovery.

Since the concussion, I’ve created roughly two hundred videos that have been posted online and also shown in several gallery exhibitions.

I still have bad days where I can’t think clearly and I feel like a mumbling fool—patience has been key in not only sitting and waiting for apps to load and render video, but also with my healing process.

UN/SEEN is a small record of this particular experience using frames from heavily manipulated, low resolution videos and then printed using stencil duplicators. Still abstracted, the laborious nature of video, the complex world of a recovering brain, the fragments of digital files, and the matrix of the internet are brought into a more tangible world via a book that is roughly the size of a smartphone. After this epic and meandering journey into PCS, I am finally joining you again in the here and now and it feels good to be back.

Follow Caroline at: @carolinezkernz 

Artist’s work can be purchased via her Etsy Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/carolinepaquita

Scroll down to view artwork and watch a video created by the artist. 

Caroline Kern Art

Un/seen images of artists

Image Description: A low resolution manipulated video still. On the left side, half of a white woman’s face is shown up close. She has short black hair, is wearing large black rimmed glasses, red lipstick and is smirking. In the middle of the frame, you see a smaller version of the same woman looking at herself in the mirror in a red, green and yellow tone, with blue and purple tones at the bottom-right of the image.

variety of portraits

Image Description: An abstract collage capture of 8 video grabs and distortions. Two frames wide by four frames long. Each image captures a different facial expression or full body pose of a woman, all with different colour tones and effects.

Full Bloom

Image Description: A picture created using linework and colours. A large sky-blue face is in the middle of the picture, with red lips, green eyes and a third green eye, without an eyebrow, in the centre of the forehead. The face is smiling with teeth showing. The hair is short, pink and purple toned curls that span the whole width of the top of the frame. The face is surrounded on all sides by flowers of different shapes, sizes and various colour combinations amongst a black backdrop.

Caroline Kern Video